Mapping Patient Trajectories: Understanding and Visualizing Sepsis Prognostic Pathways from Patients Clinical Narratives

In recent years, healthcare professionals are increasingly emphasizing on personalized and evidence-based patient care through the exploration of prognostic pathways. To study this, structured clinical variables from Electronic Health Records (EHRs) data have traditionally been employed by many researchers. Presently, Natural Language Processing models have received great attention in clinical research which expanded the possibilities of using clinical narratives. In this paper, we propose a systematic methodology for developing sepsis prognostic pathways derived from clinical notes, focusing on diverse patient subgroups identified by exploring comorbidities associated with sepsis and generating explanations of these subgroups using SHAP. The extracted prognostic pathways of these subgroups provide valuable insights into the dynamic trajectories of sepsis severity over time. Visualizing these pathways sheds light on the likelihood and direction of disease progression across various contexts and reveals patterns and pivotal factors or biomarkers influencing the transition between sepsis stages, whether toward deterioration or improvement. This empowers healthcare providers to implement more personalized and effective healthcare strategies for individual patients.

CLAIMED: A CLAssification-Incorporated Minimum Energy Design to explore a multivariate response surface with feasibility constraints

Motivated by the problem of optimization of force-field systems in physics using large-scale computer simulations, we consider exploration of a deterministic complex multivariate response surface. The objective is to find input combinations that generate output close to some desired or "target" vector. In spite of reducing the problem to exploration of the input space with respect to a one-dimensional loss function, the search is nontrivial and challenging due to infeasible input combinations, high dimensionalities of the input and output space and multiple "desirable" regions in the input space and the difficulty of emulating the objective function well with a surrogate model. We propose an approach that is based on combining machine learning techniques with smart experimental design ideas to locate multiple good regions in the input space.